Despair was the new air they breathed in the barracks of Unit 17. The morning after the sewer mission, the boy with the shattered leg was gone. A proctor had come before dawn, scanned the boy's identity tag, and declared him "non-combat capable." He was reassigned to medical disposal, a quiet, bureaucratic term for a cleanup squad sent into areas so toxic that survival was not part of the operational budget. He was a broken tool, and the state had thrown him into the incinerator.
The finality of it snapped something in Maria. During the morning roll call, she stood before Sergeant Vale, her small frame trembling with rage. "You sent him to die," she hissed. "You sent us all to die."
Vale didn't even blink. His response was a single, brutal backhand that sent her sprawling to the ground. "Assets don't speak unless spoken to," he growled, looking down at her. "Learn your place." He walked away, leaving her to be helped up by the others, a lesson in defiance delivered with brutal efficiency.
Jack watched it all, his own face a mask of shared horror and misery. But inside, his mind was a clean, cold slate, cataloging the data. The trauma from the mission had shifted the unit's emotional state. They had moved beyond simple despair and into a volatile state of instability. And instability was opportunity.
He spent the day carefully tending to his crop. He was a phantom, a whisper of carefully chosen words. He found Leo, the Glow boy, trying to clean his worn-out gear, his hands shaking so badly he could barely hold the rag. Jack sat beside him. "If we had just one real weapon," he said, his voice barely audible. "Just one good shield. Maybe it wouldn't be this bad." He didn't offer a solution. He just stated the problem, letting Leo's desperate mind search for an answer.
Later, he approached Maria as she nursed her bruised cheek. He didn't offer pity. He offered a shared anger. "They'll just keep throwing us down there until we all break," he whispered, as if he were afraid of being overheard. "Unless... unless we find something that's outside their control." He planted the idea of an alternative, a place beyond the Bureau's reach.
To one of the silent, stoic recruits, he took a different approach. He feigned morbid curiosity. "That culvert dungeon... Aaron's group never came back, right? Doesn't that mean the loot's still there? All of it?" He played on a different motivation: greed.
He never presented the dungeon as a plan. He presented it as their idea, a half-forgotten rumor, a desperate, last-ditch hope. The illusion of agency was the most potent poison of all, and they drank it down willingly.
The spark that lit the fuse came that evening, in the cacophony of the mess hall. A series of panicked shouts erupted near the entrance. A boy from another Hazard unit, his face pale and slick with sweat, stumbled through the doors. He was clutching a cheap, but undeniably real, F-rank one-handed sword.
"It's real," he babbled, his eyes wide and unfocused. "The culvert... the unregistered culvert dungeon... so many monsters, but the loot..." He collapsed to the floor, his body convulsing, a line of foam appearing on his lips. A medic proctor rushed over, but it was too late. The boy was dead, likely from some poison or bleeding he hadn't noticed. The sword was quickly confiscated by a guard.
The hall was silent. But everyone had seen it. They had seen the proof. The rumor was real.
Jack watched the scene with cold satisfaction, taking a slow sip of his lukewarm soup. A perfect advertisement, he thought. And it had only cost him a single, seeded F-rank sword. A worthwhile investment.
That night, the barracks of Unit 17 was a pressure cooker of hushed, frantic debate. The proof had broken their paralysis.
"We can't survive another mission with this trash gear," Maria insisted, her voice tight with a mixture of fear and fury. "Vale will send us back to that nest tomorrow, and we will all die. All of us."
"But if the culvert is real..." Leo whispered, his voice trembling. He was clinging to the rumor like a holy relic. "If we could just get one decent weapon... one good shield... maybe... maybe we could make it."
The others were torn, trapped between the terror of the Bureau's punishment and the certainty of death in the sewers.
Jack, who had remained silent, finally spoke. He played the part of the reluctant mediator, the voice of cautious despair. "It's suicide," he said, letting them all absorb the weight of the word. Then he delivered the final, calculated push. "But so is staying here. If we try the culvert, at least it's our choice."
The logic, simple and brutal, settled over them. It was the illusion of control they desperately needed. In the grim silence of the barracks, the decision was made. Unit 17 was going to the slaughterhouse.
As the others fell into a fitful, nightmare-filled sleep, Jack opened his dungeon interface. The population counter was still at zero. He navigated to the loot table, adjusting the parameters, ensuring that the first few chests would guarantee F-rank swords. The bait had to be irresistible.
A new, orange notification flickered in his vision.
[Tenant Group Probability Surge: 82%]
Jack smiled faintly in the darkness. He whispered the words in his mind, a silent, mocking prayer.
"Sheep choose their slaughter."
Outside the barracks, in the cold moonlight, Sergeant Vale stood talking to another proctor. His voice was a low, dismissive grumble, carried on the night air.
"Unit 17 won't last the month," he said. "Good. Better to break them fast than waste rations."
He had no idea. He had no idea he was nothing more than a shepherd, unknowingly herding his master's flock straight into a different, more efficient pen.